Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Mamey Sapote Smoothie

No need to play "what is this?" since the title of the post gives it away but you might still be left asking "What is Mamey Sapote?"

It's a native of Central America and it looks a bit like a large, rough skinned mango.

It is a delicate fruit that bruises easily so you'll find it in the stores as a hard under-ripe fruit. You'll know when it's ready to eat when you feel some give in the flesh and a more obvious sign is that the flesh itself becomes sweet potato/salmon coloured.

Describing the taste is a little more difficult. You'll read descriptions such as pumpkin, sweet potato, almond, cherry, avocado, spicy, berry, peach and apricot - what you can gather from that is that it tastes like mamey sapote. It's a fruit that left us a bit ambivalent - interesting but not interesting enough especially when compared to something like mango.

From all my reading it seems that one of the best ways to use this fruit is in a smoothie or milkshake so I've decided to heed that advice and see if our opinion could be improved.

Place the sapote, ice cream or yoghurt and milk into a blender and blend until thick and creamy.

Pour into glasses and serve at once.

While the fruit in its raw state left us a little unimpressed, the smoothie won us over. I don't know if its the influence of the milk but the taste was fabulous, I could detect some chocolate notes coming through. It looked beautiful in the glass and was refreshing to boot.

Here in Mexico where the Zapote has a somewhat longer history, the almost excessive sweetness of the fruit is cut with orange juice or papaya and lime, and blended into a dairy-less smoothie. Another common usage is in nieves (a frozen dessert resembling sorbet) where it is once again balanced with citrus. Ice-cream and milk look pretty good to me though. More Mexican recipes and articles at http://delatierrablog.blogspot.com/

I agree that the fruit on its own is a bit underwhelming. On the occasion that I tried it, I found that the texture felt like avocado, but the taste was more reminiscent of carrot. If I'm going to spend my money in tropical fruit, I'm going to stick to mangoes and mangosteens. :)

Hi Travis - that's very interesting, I didn't find this one to be overly sweet, maybe growing conditions or variety have something to do with it. I think ice-cream sounds like a great idea and I'll probably do something along that line next time.

I love love love sapotas, but I am pretty sure there are several varieties, and my experience with them has always been the type they sell in India. I have a childhood obsessions with these suckers, and I bet, much like with mangoes, they taste vastly different in various areas of the world where they are grown. Was so happy to run across this reference. Thanks!

Thank you for this post! I'm from Australia and am living in Peru. Obviously we have an immense range of fruits to choose from here and i once bought this mamey fruit. I ended up not liking it at all and after reading what you have said i believe it is because i tried it under ripe. I am going to gice it another try! I have talked about a few of the very different fruits in the following facebook album - http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.195046770513798.49744.174418105909998&l=d9cfd73425